Business

New Look, Same Great Support!

13 Mar 18 by Jim Smith

In about one month Proper Sky will be celebrating it’s 12th year in business. But many of you wouldn’t know that because we’ve done a terrible job of communicating our business successes to our customers. The shoemaker with no shoes, or in our case, the IT company with no website.

Last year, we made a concerted effort to accomplish two things, build a better toolset to communicate with our customers and develop our website to be a destination for both clients and potential clients.

What we've released today we're incredibly proud of and represents roughly months of hard work from both ourselves, and our partners. Thanks everyone for your help this last year.

Our Plan

The primary hang up to us redoing our site (and doing so for years) was the creation of content. Writing web pages, in our humble opinion, is a difficult job. There are a million different things that the web can do and getting that distilled down to what your customers want to see and what your site needs to do requires serious decision making and/or help. We opted for help and engaged Joe Taylor, Jr. and the wonderful staff of 2820 Press. We developed a comprehensive communications strategy and, over the course of nearly 6 months, wrote all of the copy for the site and about 900 other little things. Their help was instrumental in driving our success.

Our Logo

Our current logo was the primary impetus for change. In our 12 year history, we’ve had one significant logo revision and a minor refresh of that logo about 3 to 4 years ago. In our original logo the idea was to invert the P and the S to look like a mountain, with the central concept of strength, we made it more contemporary but left it the same. For us, a mountain had a lot of symbolism and meshed well with the “Sky” brand. In those intervening 12 years, however, we felt that the world of technology and rock symbols weren’t really an accurate reflection of our core values or, more importantly, of the world of technology as we experienced.

In the intervening years between the release of Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2016, the world of client server computing has experienced a veritable maelstrom of change. Servers are fading away, in office PBX’s have moved to the cloud, Software-As-A-Service has risen to dominance while both the quantity and reliability of devices have exploded. To us, we felt that we needed a logo that better represented the core value of strength but did so in the face of turbulence. Our new logo is our evocation of this emotion. 3 different colored gliders, strong and flexible, using the wind of technological change to propel our clients and ourselves forward. The future is in one direction but will require flexibility and agility to balance the oncoming change.

For this, we opted to use a design competition with 99designs. We found a great designer and spent a lot of time working together and were very happy with the results. We’ll be telling you more about the process later.

The Site

Logo and brand in hand and copy being written, we opted to perform a do-it-ourselves model. WordPress was chosen as our backend for a few reasons; It’s “free”, you don’t need to have a design degree to make additions to it, and there are hundreds of high quality add-ons and plugins that do some amazing things. In our case, the forms on our website integrate with Connectwise, our CRM, and Slack our team communication tool. Additionally, we bought a turnkey “theme” for our wordpress site from Envato thinking it would be super easy to take a few photos, update the color scheme and have a perfect site. Nothing could be further from the truth. Without monumental efforts at first by 2820 Press and later through Edgimo (one of our best and oldest customers) were we able to actually get the site built. Thanks Ben & Peter!

Other Help

As part of this process we engaged a few other incredibly helpful folks, our customers, the ones that let us take photos on their properties (Thanks Interact, Norhthern & 365 Main!). The amazing photography of Jenna Stamm which was an amazing value. The pithy, British copy writing of Thom James Carter and all the staff of Proper Sky, without whom this change would not have been possible. A heart felt thanks to you all.

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